Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the Alma service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on April 23, 2022.
The goal of this document is to share our findings regarding the event, specify the root cause analysis, outline actions to be taken to solve the downtime event, as well as preventive measures Ex Libris is taking to avoid similar cases in future.

Event Timeline

Service interruption was experienced by Ex Libris customers served by the Alma NA02 instance during the following hours: 

April 23, 2022 from 13:44 AM until 13:54 AM CDT: During the event, the service was unavailable.

Root Cause Analysis

Ex Libris engineers investigated this event to determine the root cause of this issue and concluded the following:

A malfunction was found in the database that eventually caused multiple internal database memory locks during application transactions, which subsequently caused a high load on the database server and to some DB processes to hang

Once the issue was identified, the hanged processes were killed and the system was recovered to full functionality.

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

Ex Libris has taken the following action and preventive measures to avoid such an occurrence in future:

Exlibris is working with the DB vendor to find the root cause of the problem and get a fix.

Customer Communication

ExLibris is committed to providing customers with prompt and ongoing updates during Cloud events. Ongoing and prompt updates on service interruptions appear in the system status portal at this address: http://status.exlibrisgroup.com/

These updates are automatically sent as emails to registered customers.